I want to be able to quickly spin up game servers for small sessions and tear them down afterwards. Online investigation reveals that docker-machine paired with DigitalOcean as a provider might be just what is needed. That claim needs to be tested, but a pre-requisite is that the docker and docker-machine tools be available on the local system. This post will describe how to install them on an Ubuntu box.

Repository setup

First we need to get all our dependencies installed,

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$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install \
    apt-transport-https \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    gnupg-agent \
    software-properties-common

The purpose of installing the above is to allow the apt command to be able to fetch repositories over HTTPS. Next we need to grab Docker’s official GPG key,

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$ curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/debian/gpg | sudo apt-key add -

It will be good to manually verify that we have the correct key with the following fingerprint = 9DC8 5822 9FC7 DD38 854A E2D8 8D81 803C 0EBF CD88. We can search for installed fingerprints by the last few characters,

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$ sudo apt-key fingerprint 0EBFCD88

pub   4096R/0EBFCD88 2017-02-22
    Key fingerprint = 9DC8 5822 9FC7 DD38 854A  E2D8 8D81 803C 0EBF CD88
uid                  Docker Release (CE deb) <[email protected]>
sub   4096R/F273FCD8 2017-02-22

Finally, we can use the following command to setup the stable repository,

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$ sudo add-apt-repository \
    "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
    $(lsb_release -cs) \
    stable"

Installing Docker Engine

With the above done, it becomes very straight-forward to install the docker engine with the following command,

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$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

Installing Docker Machine

Strangely enough, the official suggestion is to download the Docker Machine binary and extract it to the user’s PATH via this command,

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$ base=https://github.com/docker/machine/releases/latest/download &&
    curl -L $base/docker-machine-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m) >/tmp/docker-machine &&
    sudo mv /tmp/docker-machine /usr/local/bin/docker-machine &&
    chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-machine

At the time of typing, the lastest version for docker-machine is 0.16.2.